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I am not sure in what capacity the Duffer Brothers are involved in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, but my guess is that their fingerprints are largely absent. It was created and written by Haley Z. Boston — who also serves as showrunner — and there’s a lot more of Mike Flanagan’s DNA here than the Duffers’. That is entirely to the series’ credit. I loved it: It’s a fairy-tale anti-romance crossed with The Haunting of Hill House — creepy, addictive, bloody as hell, and a genuine cautionary tale about who you choose to marry.

They said ‘til death do us part,’ but in Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, that might come within minutes of the ceremony. Camila Morrone (Daisy Jones and the Six), who carries a distinct 2026 Fairuza Balk energy, plays Rachel. When the story opens, she’s moments away from saying “I do” before the narrative flashes back five days. She and her fiancé, Nicky (Adam DiMarco), are en route to the enormous, remote cabin where Nicky’s parents live — think The Shining, but with better wine and worse secrets. That’s where Rachel is not only meant to meet his family for the first time, but marry him.

Nicky’s family — parents Boris (Ted Levine) and Victoria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), sister Portia (Gus Birney), brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch), and Jules’ wife Nell (Karla Crome) — are all a little off. They’re keeping a secret, and that secret generates a slow, delicious dread across the opening episodes.

Once one secret is revealed, Rachel finally warms to the family — even genuinely bonds with them — before a far more unsettling truth surfaces: a very creepy 200-year-old man (Zlatko Burić) informs her that her bloodline has been cursed. If Nicky is not her soulmate and she marries him anyway, she will die, just as nearly every woman in her bloodline has on her wedding day. If she walks away, the curse transfers to Nicky’s family. She’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t.

And so the family is plunged into a collective existential reckoning about the nature of soulmates. Is there a “one”? Can there even be a “one”? Is it enough to simply believe someone is the “one”? And what do we sacrifice when we marry the wrong person? One’s life, potentially, in Rachel’s case.

This philosophical undercurrent runs beneath the surface of a wealthy, deeply dysfunctional family drama thick with buried secrets, a boogeyman called the Sorry Man who turns out to be terrifyingly real, and a relentless atmosphere of snow, blood, and creeping dread. But it’s also riveting — increasingly so the more we come to know Rachel, Nicky, and his fractured family. We don’t want any of them to die, and yet that’s the irresistible tension coiled at the story’s center: What happens if and when Rachel says “I do”? Are these two people truly meant for each other? Can any two people actually be meant to be? And what, exactly, will happen if Rachel drinks a concoction of champagne, Nicky’s semen, and her amputated toe?

That’s the delirious, demented fun of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen: unraveling the nature of the curse and deciding just how seriously to take it. It’s a madly devious, genuinely addictive blast — one of those Flanagan-esque series you simply cannot turn off until it’s 1 a.m. and your bleary eyes have staged a full revolt.